A outstanding Iraqi Christian religious leader who left Baghdad amid a political dispute last 12 months returned to the capital this week on the invitation of the country’s prime minister after nine months of self-imposed exile in northern Iraq’s Kurdish region.
Cardinal Louis Sako was welcomed warmly by a church full of members of the country’s Christian minority as he led his first mass in Baghdad on Friday after returning the day before.
Sako had withdrawn from his headquarters in Baghdad to the Kurdish regional capital, Irbil, last July after Iraqi President Abdul Latif Rashid revoked a decree recognizing his position as patriarch of the Chaldeans, Iraq’s largest Christian denomination and considered one of the Catholic Church’s eastern rites.
The Iraqi president downplayed his revocation of Sako’s recognition as bureaucratic housekeeping, claiming it didn’t diminish the patriarch’s legal or religious status, but Sako called it an affront to the church and said he wouldn’t return to Baghdad until his recognition was reinstated.
His departure added to the sensation of helplessness amongst many Iraqi Christians, who often feel politically sidelined and who had been targeted violently first by al-Qaida after which by the Islamic State militant group. A 2021 visit by Pope Francis provided a glimmer of hope that quickly faded. Many of the Christian villages destroyed as IS rampaged across the country remain in ruins, their former inhabitants scattered.
The variety of Christians in Iraq today is estimated at 150,000, compared with 1.5 million in 2003. Iraq’s total population is greater than 40 million.
At the time of his departure, Sako blamed a campaign against him by Rayan al-Kildani, a fellow Chaldean Christian who’s head of the Bablyon Movement political party and founding father of a militia called the Babylon Brigades that fought against IS and still patrols much of the Nineveh plains. The group is affiliated with the Popular Mobilization Forces, a set of primarily Shiite, Iran-backed militias.
Sako accused al-Kildani of angling to take over Christian endowments and properties, which Al-Kildani denied while making similar allegations about Sako.
Sako said Friday that Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani had formally invited him to return. He thanked al-Sudani for the overture and for his “intention to unravel the issue in an appropriate manner and restore dignity to the Chaldean Church” and said God had given him “strength and wisdom all through this difficult period.”
Iraqi Christians “don’t accept being a source of tensions,” Sako said. Rather, “Christians, who’ve turn into a numerical minority, must be a source of sunshine, love and comprehensive brotherhood, as taught by Jesus Christ,” he said.
The patriarch said he would return to Irbil to settle some logistical matters before returning permanently to Baghdad.
Al-Sudani’s office said in a press release that in a gathering with Sako upon his return Thursday, he had expressed “the importance of his presence and role, stressing the federal government’s keenness to consolidate the principle of coexistence and brotherhood across the spectrum of Iraqi society.”
